“So
far. But I hope you aren’t going to stop before the
important part.”
“All
right. Verdean thought some more—by himself. He
was sunk, anyhow. He
had to rob the bank if he was going to
save his own skin. So
why shouldn’t he keep all the boodle
for himself? … That’s just what he
decided to do. The
branch is a small one, and nobody would have thought of
questioning anything he did. It was easy for him to pack a load of dough into a
small valise and take it out with him
when he went home to lunch—just before
the holdup was
timed to take place. Nobody would have thought of asking
him what he
had in his bag; and as for the money, well, of
course the holdup men
would be blamed for getting away
with it. But he didn’t want Judd and Morrie
on his tail, so he
tipped off the police anonymously, meaning for them to be
caught,
and feeling pretty sure that nobody would believe any accusations they made
about him—or at least not until
he had plenty of time to hide it.
…
There were
still a few
holes in the idea, but he was too desperate to worry
about
them. His real tragedy was when Kaskin and Dolf didn’t get
caught
after all, and came after him to ask questions. And
naturally that’s when
we all started to get together.”
“And
then?”
The Saint
raised his head and looked at her again.
“Maybe
I’m very dense,” he said apologetically, “but isn’t
that enough
?”
“It’s
almost uncanny. But there’s still the most important
thing.”
“What
would that be?”
“Did
you find out what happened to the money ?”
The Saint
was silent for a moment. He elongated his legs
still farther, so that
they stretched out over the carpet like a
pier; his recumbent
body looked as if it were composing
itself for sleep. But the eyes that he
bent on her were bright
and amused and very cheerfully awake.
She said:
“What are you grinning about?”
“I’d
just been wondering when it was coming, darling,” he murmured. “I
know that my dazzling beauty brings
admiring sightseers from all quarters
like moths to a candle,
but they usually want something else as well.
And it’s been
very nice to see you and have this little chat, but I
was always
afraid you were hoping to get something out of it. So this
is
what it is. Morrie and Judd sent you along to get an answer to
that
question, so they’d know whether it was safe to bump
me off or not. If Verdean is still keeping
his mouth shut, they
can go ahead and fix me
a funeral; but if I’ve found out
where
it is I may have even moved it somewhere else by now,
and it would be awkward to have me buried before I
could
tell them where I’d moved it to.
Is that all that’s worrying
you?”
“Not
altogether,” she said, without hesitation. “They didn’t have to send
me for that. I talked them into letting
me come because I told
them you’d probably talk to me for
longer than you’d talk to them and
anyhow you wouldn’t
be so likely to punch me on the nose. But I really did it
because I wanted to see you myself.”
The
flicker that passed over Simon’s face was almost imperceptible.
“I
hope it’s been worth it,” he said flippantly; but he was
watching
her with a coolly reserved alertness.
“That’s
what you’ve got to tell me,” she said. She looked away from him for a
moment, stubbed out her cigarette
nervously, looked back at him again with difficult
frankness.
Her hands moved uncertainly. She
went on in a rush: “You see, I know Judd doesn’t mean to give me my share.
I could
trust you. Whatever happens,
they’re going to give you
trouble. I
know you can take care of yourself, but I don’t
suppose you’d mind
having it made easier for you. I could be
on
your side, without them knowing, and I wouldn’t want
much.”
The Saint
blew two smoke rings with leisured care, placing
them side by side
like the lenses of a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles. They
drifted towards the ceiling, enlarging
languidly.
His face
was inscrutable, but behind that pleasantly non
committal mask he was
thinking as quickly as he could.
He might
have come to any decision. But before he could
say anything there
was an interruption.
The door
was flung open, and Hoppy Uniatz crashed in.
Mr Uniatz’s
face was not at all inscrutable. It was as elementarily easy to read as an
infant’s primer. The ecstatic
protrusion of his eyes, the lavish enthusiasm of his breathing,
the broad beam that divided his physiognomy into
two approximately equal halves, and the roseate glow which
suffused his
homely countenance, were all reminiscent of the
symptoms of bliss that must have illuminated the features of
Archimedes at the epochal moment of his life. He
looked
like a man who had just made
the inspirational discovery of
the
century in his bath.
“It
woiked, boss,” he yawped exultantly, “it woiked I De
dough is in
Hogsbotham’s bedroom!”
VIII
S
IMON TEMPLAR
kept still. It cost him a heroic effort but he did it. He felt as
if he were balanced on top of a thin glass
flagpole
in the middle of an earthquake, but he managed to
keep the surface of his nonchalance intact. He
kept Angela
Lindsay’s hands always
within the radius of his field of vision, and said rather faintly: “What
woiked?”
Mr Uniatz
seemed slightly taken aback.
“Why,
de idea you give me dis afternoon, boss,” he
explained, as though
he saw little need for such childish elucidations. “You remember, you are
saying why can’t we
sock
dis guy de udder way an’ knock his memory back. Well,
I am t’inkin’ about dat, an’ it seems okay to me, an’ I ain’t got nut’n
else to do on account of de door is locked an’ I
finished all de Scotch; so I haul off an’ whop him on de
toinip wit’ de end of my Betsy. Well, he is out for
a long
time, an’ when he comes round
he still don’t seem to know
what it’s
all about, but he is talkin’ about how dis guy
Hogsbotham gives him a key to look after de house when he
goes away, so he goes in an’ parks de lettuce in
Hogsbotham’s
bedroom. It is a swell idea, boss, an’ it woiks,”
said Mr Uniatz, still marvelling at the genius which had conceived it.
The Saint
felt a clutching contraction under his ribs which
was not quite like the
gastric hollowness of dismay and defensive tension which might reasonably have
been there. It was a second or two before he could get a perspective on it; and
when he did so, the realization of what it was made
him feel slightly
insane.
It was
simply a wild desire to collapse into helpless
laughter. The whole
supernal essence of the situation was
so immortally ludicrous that he was
temporarily incapable
of worrying about the fact that Angela
Lindsay was a member
of the audience. If she had taken a gun out
of her bag and
announced that she was going to lock them up while she
went back to tell Kaskin and Dolf the glad news, which
would have been the
most obviously logical thing for her
to do, he would probably have been too
weak to lift a finger
to prevent it.
Perhaps the
very fact that she made no move to do so did
more than anything
else to restore him to sobriety. The ache
in his chest died
away, and his brain forced itself to start
work again. He knew
that she had a gun in her beg—he had looked for it and distinguished the
outline of it when he first
came into the room to meet her, and that was
why he
had never let himself completely lose sight of her hands.
But her
hands only moved to take another cigarette. She
smiled at him as if
she was sharing the joke, and struck a
match.
“Well,”
he said dryly, “it looks like you’ve got your
answer.”
“To
one question,” she said. “You haven’t answered the
other. What
shall I tell Judd?”
Simon studied her for the space
of a couple of pulse-beats.
In that time, he
thought with a swiftness and clarity that
was almost clairvoyant. He saw every angle and every
prospect and every possible surprise.
He also
saw Patricia standing aghast in the doorway behind
the gorilla shoulders
of Mr Uniatz, and grinned impudently
at her.
He stood
up, and put out his hand to Angela Lindsay.
“Go
back and tell Morrie and Judd that we found out where the dough was last
night,” he said. “Verdean had
buried it in a
flowerbed. A couple of pals of mine dug it out
in the small hours of
this morning and took it to London.
They’re sitting over it with a pair of
machine-guns in my
apartment at Cornwall House now, and I dare anybody to
take it away. That ought to hold ‘em… . Then you shake
them off
as soon as you can, and meet me at the Stag and
Hounds opposite
Weybridge Common in two hours from
now. We’ll take you along with us and
show you Hogsbotham’s
nightshirts!”
She faced
him steadily, but with a suppressed eagerness
that played
disturbing tricks with her moist lips.
“You
mean that ? You’ll take me in with you ?”
“Just
as far as you want to be taken in, kid,” said the
Saint.
He
escorted her to the front door. There was no car
outside, but
doubtless Messrs Kaskin and Dolf were waiting
for her a little way up
the road. He watched her start down the drive, and then he closed the door and
turned back.
“You’d
look better without the lipstick,” said Patricia
judicially.
He thumbed
his nose at her and employed his hand
kerchief.
“Excuse
me if I seem slightly scatterbrained,” he remarked.
“But
all this is rather sudden. Too many things have
happened in the last
few minutes. What would you like to
do with the change from fifteen thousand quid ? There ought
to be a few bob left after I’ve paid for my
last lot of shirts
and bought a new
distillery for Hoppy.”
“Have
you fallen right off the edge,” she asked interestedly,
“or
what is it?”
“At a
rough guess, I should say it was probably ‘What’ “.
The
Saint’s happy lunacy was too extravagant to cope with. “But who cares ?
Why should a little thing like this cause so
much commotion ? Have you no faith in
human nature ? The
girl’s better nature was
revived. My pure and holy personality
has
done its work on her. It never fails. My shining example
has made her soul pant for higher things. From now
on, she is going to be on the side of the Saints. And she is going to take care
of Judd and Morrie. She is going to lead them for
us, by the nose, into the soup. Meanwhile,
Professor
Uniatz has shaken the
scientific world to its foundations
with bis new and startling treatment
for cases of concussion.
He has whopped
Comrade Verdean on the turnip with the
end
of his Betsy and banged his memory back, and we are
going to lay our hands on fifteen thousand smackers
before
we go to bed tonight, And we
are going to find all this
boodle in
the bedroom of Ebenezer Hogsbotham, of all the
superlative places in the world, I ask you, can life hold any
more?”
He
exploded out of the hall into the study, and went on
into the secret room,
leaving her staring after him a trifle
dazedly.
He was
bubbling with blissful idiocy, but his mind was
cool. He had already
diagnosed the effects of the Uniatz
treatment so completely that his visit
was really only
intended to reassure himself that it had actually worked.
He
studied Verdean coldbloodedly. The bank manager’s eyes were vacant and
unrecognizing: he rolled his head mono
tonously from side to
side and kept up a delirious mumble
from which the main points of the
summary that Hoppy
Uniatz had made were absurdly easy to pick out. Over and
over again
he reiterated the story—how Mr Hogsbotham
had asked him as a
neighbour to keep an eye on the house
during some of his absences, how he had been entrusted with
a key which he had never remembered to
return, and how
when he was wondering
what to do with the stolen money
he
had remembered the key and used it to find what should
have been an unsuspectable hiding place for his
booty. He
went on talking about it.
…